Cogdoc
This project aims at providing a platform for sharing course materials (slides and audio/video records) among teachers and students from French speaking universities related to an international and interdisciplinary research group. A prototype was made at Troyes University of Technology with Agorae, a web space for topic map cooperative building, and Argos, a web service implementing our protocol for community-driven organizations of knowledge. In according with the Socio-semantic Web approach, the prototype provided a space for documents, interpretation and intersubjectivity.
Two teachers have documented forty course lectures (see Fig. 1) with their corresponding slides (one version to be displayed, one to be annotated), exercises (if any), and description (title, author, date...).
Course lectures have been primarily classified according to their universities, majors and learning units. This catalogue made of pre-existing official topics can be browsed from a tab called `universities' (see Fig. 2).
Once the teacher or student is logged in, any course lecture screen shows a panel for tagging (see Fig. 3). On the top of this panel is a drop-down list of viewpoints, related to this user. Within a selected viewpoint (see Fig. 3a), she is able to reuse tags assigned by someone else (see Fig. 3b) or to input her own tags (see Fig. 3c).
Then, tags can be accessed through a personal tab and be used to browse one's personal collection of course lectures (see Fig. 4). Therefore, contrary to the primary classification scheme, tags are unstructured and uncontrolled terms chosen by the user for her own use. But the more the user reuses the tags on different lectures, the more she reveals intertextual links between them, and the more she organizes her knowledge of the field.
The hundreds of tags assigned by seventy students and teachers are dynamically aggregated into a tag cloud dependent on the page (see Fig. 1-2). To reduce misspelled or erroneous tags we filtered out tags used only once or twice from the cloud. Moreover, even if participants were incited to choose popular expressions as tags, and reuse them, the diversity was so important that we had to show only the eighty most frequent tags per cloud (and make them case insensitive).
The resulting emergent description of courses, majors and universities in term of learnt knowledge and know-how is quite interesting in what it affords: - for students to choose a university or course, to revise for exams, to communicate ideas, to evaluate course sessions, to set milestones, to express opinions, - for teachers to detect students misunderstandings, false interpretations or needs for discussion on certain topics, - for university staff to validate courses passed by students in other universities, to match job opportunities with majors, or to change the organization of major or courses.
However, because education cannot be replaced by the `wisdom of crowds', intersubjectivity is also featured in a more asymmetric and personal mode between teachers and students. Whilst the viewpoint of a teacher is public in order to be used as a reference (see Fig. 5), the viewpoint of a student can only be accessed by her teacher, so that the teacher can evaluate and grade what she understood.
Aurélien Bénel, Chao Zhou, Jean-Pierre Cahier. Beyond Web 2.0... And Beyond the Semantic Web. In: Randall, David; Salembier, Pascal (Eds.). From CSCW to Web 2.0: European Developments in Collaborative Design. Springer Verlag. 2010. p. 155-171.